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Chapter Four: Africa in Mexico: An Intellectual History
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| chapter Four | Africa in mexico an inTeLLeCTuaL hisTory This chapter explores “the Africa thesis,” as John McDowell (2000:9) terms the ascription of Africanity to coastal belt morenos. I begin by reconstructing an intellectual genealogy that began with Franz Boas’s student Melville Herskovits, the first academic to establish African and African American studies at a major university in the United States. As my reconstruction shows, scholars of peoples of African descent in the New World were engaged in transnational dialogue long before the term transnational came to describe circular migration. Yet culture workers today almost universally neglect the genealogy of the intellectual paradigms they often unconsciously deploy. As a result, models derived from the earliest dialogues are still current in scholarly evaluations of San Nicoladenses. These models focus on race, impose a Eurocentric model of such, and overlap biological and cultural constructs, so that “black” becomes Afromexican or Afromestizo, while a particular ethos is attributed to peoples of African descent. melville herskovits and the Concept of survivals In an essay published in 2006, Kevin Yelvington establishes Herskovits as a “key actor” in initiating cultural and historical knowledge about New World Americans of African descent as 120 | chapter Four Herskovits’s “theoretical positioning came to occupy a central place in . . . anthropological investigations” (2006b:38; see also Price and Price 2003:77– 29; Vinson 2006:11). In recent years Herskovits’s work with students, his influences on and influences by Latin and African American researchers such as Fernando Ortíz, Jean Price Mars, Arturo Ramos, Arthur Schomburg, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Lorenzo Dow Turner, and the milieu of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s—which created an intellectual and cultural climate for the theoretical inscription of black and Afrocentric identities—have become better known (Jackson 1986; Mintz 1990; Price and Price 2003:77; Yelvington 2006b). As Herskovits’s teacher, Boas, of course, deeply influenced his pupil’s intellectualdevelopment(Jackson1986;Mintz1990:x–xi;Yelvington2006b). Although Boas did not escape the intellectual shackles of his day that reified race, he did separate race from cultural achievement, understanding cultures as unique and equal. This understanding leaves Boas’s work characterized by a tension between universalist-assimilationist strategies and the expression of cultural difference.The same tension resurfaces in Herskovits’s work (Jackson 1986) because he, like his teacher, linked cultural uniqueness to history and historical transmission. Early in Herskovits’s career he affirmed the “assimilation” of African Americans into “white” culture and insisted on “complete acculturation” (Yelvington 2006b:45), thereby taking a stance perceived as antiracist. Soon he entered into dialogue with the African American intellectual vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance, “a product of the ‘talented tenth,’ . . . disproportionately made up of the multiracial elite” (Daniel 2006:112). In the political climate of the day this vanguard could not acknowledge its own multiracial background and therefore confronted something of a paradox: On the one hand, it formed part of a select group, mostly from the urban northeastern United States, that operated within a “European American sociocultural tradition ” (Daniel 2006:114). On the other hand, it wished to reconnect with a more distant blackness in the rural South (Baker 1998:161–62) and in northern inner cities to develop a “distinctive cultural tradition with roots in the African past and in Afro-American folklore” (Jackson 1986:101; see alsoYelvington 2006b:45–49). In the context of Jim Crow laws and the increasingly constricting rule of hypodescent, which prevailed over an earlier and more “liberal” definition of race that allowed for degrees of admixture, African American intellectuals “became” black (Daniel 2006:115–16). Influenced [54.163.195.125] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:00 GMT) aFrica in mexico | 121 particularly by the Afro–Puerto Rican Schomburg and the African American Locke, Herskovits modified his initial position, developing in its place a typology of intensities of so-called Africanisms. This typology allowed him to resolve tensions in his work by arguing simultaneously for assimilation (African Americans) and for the retention of African survivals (the Saramaka Maroons) (see also Price and Price 2003; Yelvington 2006b:66–67). The most intense Africanisms were African cultural forms transmitted intact across time and space.These included attitudes toward the dead; plural marriage; flexible religious worldviews; and types of music and dance (Herskovits 1990:63–64, 70–72, 75–76). In accentuating the distinctiveness of peoples of African descent, Herskovits, like Boas, attempted to avoid arguments about racial inferiority or superiority by focusing on culturally and...